ExxonMobil has announced that it will be looking into several regions for multiple carbon capture and storage (CCS) opportunities. The company aims to expand its CCS business in places around the world in an effort to reduce its enormous carbon footprint.
The company founded its low-carbon division called Low Carbon Solutions at the beginning of the year with its main focus on carbon capture and storage. Its goals are related to decarbonizing hard to abate sectors like power generation and industrial production.
The VP of marketing, finance & commercial development of Low Carbon Solutions, Tracy Lothian announced recently that the oil giant believes there is over 300 billion tons of storage capacity in Southeast Asia alone.
The VP based in Singapore announced that the company is working with the Singapore energy center and various universities to understand the CO2 storage capacity in the region. That signals Exxon is moving forward with its planning announced in 2021 to create a carbon capture and storage hub in the Singapore region to serve Southeast Asia.
The hub is one of several such ideas that will establish CCS projects around the world to capture emissions from industrial operations. The Singapore CCS hub would focus on taking away emissions from Singapore manufacturing facilities for permanent storage in the area.
Other regions that the company is eyeing are Netherlands, Belgium, Scotland, Qatar, the US Gulf Coast, and Wyoming. In the Netherlands, Exxon is taking part in a consortium together with Shell, Air Liquide, and Air Products to build carbon capture and storage projects in the Port of Rotterdam. Called the Porthos CCS hub, it aims to collect CO2 emissions from industrial sources and transport them by pipeline to depleted North Sea offshore gas fields.
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In Belgium, ExxonMobil is participating in the multi-stakeholder CCS project at the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s largest integrated energy and chemicals cluster. It would collect CO2 emissions from industrial sources for storage.
In Scotland, ExxonMobil is progressing discussions to support the Acorn project while in Qatar – ExxonMobil is a partner in several existing joint ventures with Qatar Petroleum that operate a CCS project with an annual capacity of 2.1 million metric tons at Ras Laffan.
Exxon’s carbon capture expansion in the Singapore region is showing oil companies are making progress towards the large-scale deployment of CCS. As the number of projects around the world pile up, soon the carbon capture technology’s barriers for widespread development like costs could drop and the world could see bigger emissions reductions if CCS proves that it is indeed working as promised.
